Abstract This article examines the emergence and use of periodicals among displaced people in Switzerland as sources of refugee knowledge in the aftermath of the Second World War. Based on a close examination of two such publications that appeared between 1943 and 1950, as well as supplementary archival materials, the article shows how critical knowledge about return and emigration was disseminated through these mediums. It argues that Swiss refugee periodicals helped forge a community in transit, aiding in the mental and practical preparation of refugees’ postwar existence, while also entrenching national governments’ and international organisations’ refugee policies. Focusing on the medium of knowledge production at an actor-centred, microhistorical level, the article contributes both to our understanding of the formation of postwar refugeedom ‘from below’ as well as the alpine republic’s particular place within the global refugee regime.

Abstract In this article, I investigate lost knowledge in popular entertainment in Austria following the Second World War. Through a close examination of Stella Kadmon’s activities to re-establish popular entertainment, I examine the way popular theatre and political cabaret unfolded in Vienna (and beyond) starting from the postwar period until the 1980s. In tracing Kadmon’s activities when reopening her theatre, I identify gaps in the entertainment tradition, and ask how those who were not persecuted and remained during the war years – most of whom were strongly influenced by National Socialist ideas – were able to produce theatre in the face of the construction of a new ‘Austrian’ repertoire of popular culture. I base my investigation on two theoretical frameworks by cultural theorists: Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘back-then’ in the intermediating process of the construction of old into new identifications; and Homi K. Bhabha’s paradigm of ‘other knowledge’ in the making of colonial discourses.

Abstract This special issue introduces the concept of e-motions in (post-)slavery Africa to analyse movement or motion that is not so much driven by labour and economic survival but rather by relational/emotional (dis-)connection. We introduce the term e-motions to qualify the gendered mobilities mainly of subaltern girls and women who have been voluntarily or forcedly moving in the past and present to establish and consolidate emotional ties. These ties exist in intimate spheres that are profoundly entangled in histories of slavery and asymmetrical dependencies. In this special issue, we use the concept of e-motions to flesh out the link between small-scale and rural (im-)mobilities executed by subaltern women and girls, who are expected to fulfil important ritualised roles in various emotional stages of life through pathic labour and care work. While not denying we are living in a world with exponential digitisation, mobilities and extreme forms of exclusion, we wish to historicise less spectacular but acute, highly impactful and often implicitly violent e-motions that mostly women at the lowest echelons of their societies faced and continue to face in a male-dominated world.

Abstract In July 2023, the Dutch coalition government collapsed over the issue of family immigration policies. The coalition partners disagreed on how to restrict the immigration of family members. It was not the first time the Dutch government sought to introduce restrictions. An earlier attempt in 1984 resulted in a large protest against a Dutch government measure, which restricted the possibilities for young people with a migratory background to marry a partner who was not living in the Netherlands. The protest was connected to larger debates on family migration, measures introduced trying to restrict it, and – in a broad sense – to debates about civil society movements, intimate citizenship, politics of belonging and the restrictionist paradox, as this article will explain. This article also seeks to explain the interaction between organisations, media and politicians.

Abstract This article explores the North American Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s, a transnational network of churches and volunteers who used civil disobedience to spotlight the United States’ harmful policies in Central America, provide a non-statist form of protection for forcibly displaced Salvadorans and Guatemalans, and challenge the unequal provision of the US’s recently enacted asylum laws. Some of the research questions are deceptively simple: why did the Sanctuary Movement (or movements) exist? And, who were its leaders? Others are more utilitarian: what does the movement imply about the history of asylum in the US, and particularly the efficacy and equity of the protections set forth in the 1980 Refugee Act? Through these varied but related inquiries, this article suggests the 1980s Sanctuary Movement existed in the US because equitable asylum laws did not. The analysis concludes by underscoring sanctuary’s continued resonances today.

Abstract The aim of the article is to present the issue of entertainment in the account of the Polish military and independence activist Józef Feliks Zieliński, from his first months in exile in France in 1832. He was one of the tens of thousands of Polish refugees (the Great Emigration) who, after the collapse of the Independence Uprising (1830–1831) (aimed at freeing the Kingdom of Poland from Russian rule), left their native country. A few thousand came to France, where they received money in the first few months. His observations are unique and of great value to a historian studying everyday life in exile in France. Compared to other diaries of the insurgents, they are distinguished by the description of intimate life. He presented the taboo subject of the use of prostitutes by representatives of the Great Emigration.

Abstract In the aftermath of the Second World War, the city of Rijeka experienced dramatic demographic changes. A significant part of the local population left for Italy, and domestic migrants arrived from the territories of the Yugoslav Federation. Besides the need to create a new urban fabric, the local authorities had to manage the chaotic – and often unorganised – influx of labour, that ranged from unskilled workers to party cadres. One of the main challenges that the city had to tackle was to provide newcomers with decent accommodation in what was then a war-torn city without proper housing. Housing became a barometer of how integrated a person had become, or how marginalised those at the bottom of the social ladder were. As the article argues, access to decent housing not only mirrored class differentiation but also fostered boundaries of exclusion or inclusion within the social fabric. Those living in makeshift accommodation were burdened by additional stigmatisation, despite them being integrated into the labour market.

Abstract This article explores how Dortmund’s municipal government propagated a concept of city-citizenship and belonging for new arrivals by mediating between expellee, refugee and migrant communities and ‘native’ civil society in the 1940s-1950s. The devastation of Dortmund during the Second World War, and the housing and energy shortages that followed, meant that the arrival of over a hundred thousand expellees and refugees in 1945–1960 placed severe strains on municipal resources while exacerbating conflicts between ‘native’ Dortmunders and new arrivals. The success of the Social Democratic Party (spd) in building a hegemonic position in postwar politics and administration by the late 1940s facilitated the coordination of municipal efforts to foster inter-community relations and introduce new populations to city life. Within the city council and government, in expellee meetings, and in municipal events we observe sustained municipal efforts to 1) exert social control over expellee/refugee arrivals to deflect anger at the poor conditions of the reconstruction period away from municipal officials and 2) inculcate taboos based on peace and democratic norms to delegitimise the politics of inter-community resentment. It concludes by tracing how official narratives and municipal practices constructed in the 1940s-50s were redeployed during the arrival of guest workers in the 1960s.

Abstract This paper investigates the role of trust relationships through a re-examination of the activities of intermediaries (recruiters) in the Indian indentured labour system of the Indian Ocean in the colonial era. A review of the utilisation of trust in development discourse and its applicability to the literature of colonial subaltern migration and to a specific historical context is undertaken. The paper demonstrates that informal trust networks are critical to an understanding of the operation of indenture, that the appraisal of their functioning and effectiveness necessitates the construction of a counter narrative to the ‘official’ archive, and suggests a new means of adapting the trust discourse to this field of study through an assessment of how these knowledge and information networks were disseminated and by whom.

Abstract This article is based on a longitudinal study of migrants living in a tenement block of the Paris area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It argues that the geodesic distance between spouses’ and witnesses’ exact birthplaces, which are easier to retrieve than ever before, is a valuable metric for a quantitative analysis of marriages and friendships, with a view to assessing the salience of ethnicity. In that particular case, the analysis results in a general exogamy increase over time, which only partially corresponds to a greater demographic diversity. It also suggests that if and when identifications based on origin were given relevance in people’s affinities, local solidarity was generally more operative than a broadly conceived ethnicity. However, differences emerge between various groups of inhabitants. When looking out of their micro-community, only the Spanish occupants seemed inclined to choose a spouse or a witness among their fellow nationals over someone from another origin entirely.